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<nettime> On_Eyal_Weizman's_Hollow_Land |
[there is a lot more reviews at: http://roundtable.kein.org/node/655 /fls] From: Markus Miessen <miessen at studiomiessen.com> When thoughts turn into acts, On Eyal Weizman?s Hollow Land In Notre Musique, Jean Luc Godard has a diplomat ask a writer: ?do writers know what they are talking about?? ?Of course not?, the writer replies, ?those who act never have the ability to talk or think adequately about what they do.? In early April 2007, US soldiers started building a concrete wall, separating one of Baghdad's Sunni enclaves from surrounding Shia neighbourhoods. This wall is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a genealogy of historic references of power-architectures and their oppositional reverberations, ranging from the Berlin Wall and the Vietcong?s Cu Chi tunnel system to the Fence for Life, a security barrier along Israel?s borders. Recently, architects and urban planners have started to understand the importance of their critical role within political, social, and spatial complexities ?? producing engagements other than those of the ?commissioned project?. Over the course of the last decade, one can trace an interesting phenomenon: that of the spatial practitioner inhabiting the role of the uninvited outsider. Those ?cross-bench politicians? pro-actively force their way into discourses that are usually not understood as the remit of their profession. Operating without mandate, such role is understood as a mode of participation that is conflictual rather than consensual. This non-physical violence opens up an operative margin that enables the rethinking of local and indeed global politics. Israeli architect and theorist Eyal Weizman has spent half a decade of pioneering research on the ?military urbanism? of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His work has forced a new critique of the occupied territories, through the goggles of an urban planner. Part of what he discovered is that the realities on the ground are constructed by a fusion of military generals, urbanists, and intellectuals, the result of which is a form of warfare that is designed to work against the spatialisation of a Palestinian State. Weizman?s work is an indicator for both a change in contemporary spatial practices as well as in our conception of the politics of space. What many educational institutions in Europe, and most certainly in the US, haven?t realised is that the discourse on spatial politics outside those institutions is already miles ahead. Weizman?s reacted by launching a new department at Goldsmiths College. As the Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, he managed to formalise parts of his own practice: investigating the politics of space. Hollow Land, Weizman?s most encompassing publication to date, archives his investigation on the political methodologies that allow for a physical transformation of the Israeli/Palestinian landscape. In order to understand the long-term strategies employed by city planners and cartographers that use settlements and borders to delay the assembly of a Palestinian State, he radically exposes how purpose-built hilltop-settlements turn into strategic weapons, how soldiers double as architects, and how the Israeli military is using post-structuralist theory as a means of preparing operations. The book explores both the political system behind the conflict as well as the incentives of colonial occupation. From militarized airspace to the natural and built features that function as ammunition with which the conflict is waged, the publication critically unravels Israel?s state-sponsored policy of expansion, and how ?? within the architectural and urban planning professions ?? extremely sophisticated strategies have been devised in order to turn military thinking into actualised space. Here, space is understood as an embodiment of ideology. In a conversation I recently had with Weizman, he claimed, ?geopolitics is a flat discourse. It largely ignores the vertical dimension and tends to look across rather than cut through the landscape.? The narratives within Weizman?s thesis are always spatial. It defines what he calls the ?Politics of Verticality? as the process that fragmented the territory of the West Bank not only in surface but also in volume. With the technologies and infrastructure required for the physical segregation of Israelis from Palestinians along complex volumetric borders, he argues that the most complex geo-political issue of the Middle East has gone through a scale-shift and took on architectural dimensions. The book is spatially most precise in the chapter titled ?Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror?. Here, Weizman elucidates the spatial relationships between what he calls the transparent border and the architectural features of checkpoints. Whatever he interrogates, he tries to understand how architecture becomes operational within the conflict. Whether Weizman discusses the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Sharon's re-conceptualization of military defence through the planning and architecture of settlements, or the contemporary discourse and practice of urban warfare, he never speaks from a single point of view. The book embodies a multitude of views, perspectives and respective audiences. At times, the methodology with which Weizman approaches his writing could be described as that of legal documents, those that are generated by different voices and combine various modes and rationales. The different material practices he presents become a direct register of politics. While Hollow Land, seen from the point of view of an archive, is never bound to one species of text, the author avoids the singularity of a particular role. He acts as human rights consultant, spatial practitioner, academic and curator simultaneously. The book is a discussion rather than a singular statement, it constitutes the beginning of an open-ended dialogue, the setting of a forum: a theory saturated with things. What one is confronted with is not architectural theory, but an idea of architecture as a tactic of operation. Probably the most important and commendable achievement of the book is that it points at an acute reality: the crimes that manifest spatially are in desperate need of dismantling; not only by politicians or Human Rights groups, but architects and planners, recognizing the relationship (and their own entanglements) between space and power. Architecture is by nature enlisted to political and economic goals, it serves the establishment, capital and complies with state and municipal regulations. But architectural practice is often romantically perceived as a creative profession only. Tomorrow?s practice should reach for an architecture of spatial standards and frameworks that prevent future scenarios in which architects? can commit crimes against Humanity. Is there even a need for a Geneva Convention for the built environment, a court of justice to persecute spatial war crimes? Hollow Land points at the potentials of the autonomous space of production. It exemplifies how discursive theory can be turned into practice, while the space which one is operating from becomes an enabler. Whereas the artistic space, and its autonomy, is usually thought of as a test-ground that only affects a certain audience, Weizman?s act supersedes the symbolic. While human rights groups, the Palestinian government, artist collectives and curators are referencing his writing simultaneously, it has become an index of politics. The physicality of the book presents a somewhat new type on the architecture bookshelf: it feels like it wants to speak to a larger audience, one that gets their books at Borders?s history section at Stansted Airport. This is a highly important and commendable move. While theorists of various disciplines have discussed those issues in relatively closed-off circles so far, Hollow Land is a genuine attempt to break with this isolated discourse and take it out there. The graphic design, general layout, and style of writing (which never comes across as theory), help a great deal. The Museum of the City of New York recently showed a retrospective on the work of Robert Moses. The most unsettling part of the exhibition was a small piece of stencilled text on the wall, a quote by Moses saying: ?the critics build nothing?. Maybe it is time to understand that Godard was right and that the critique brought forward in critical spatial discourses are acts, practices, and an architecture in itself. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org